


Inheriting the Family Business

by Luana Araceli (Luana_Araceli)



Category: Original Work
Genre: Action, Drama, Gen, Kidnapping, Suspense, Torture, Underground, family business, underground world
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-08-18
Updated: 2017-08-18
Packaged: 2018-12-16 19:57:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,670
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11835954
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Luana_Araceli/pseuds/Luana%20Araceli
Summary: Alyssa White is the heir to a multimillionaire. Only, the multimillionaire in question runs one of the most successful kidnapping rings in the world. And the kidnapping industry isn't what you think - it's an industry built on saving children from abusive homes rather than ransoming them from rich families. When kidnappers go bad, they have to be put down. And the White family is notorious for their ability to deal with the ones that go bad. Before she can inherit the business, Alyssa must prove she is up to the job.





	1. Chapter One

You see it all the time in movies. Kids rebel against their parents as teenagers, refuse to join the family business, and act like they know more than the adults around them. Teenagers are notorious for being rebellious not only in movies but also reality. You hear them all the time – the stories about teenagers going out of their way to act out against their parents. In the movies, though, you even see teenagers who grow up in mafia families rebelling against their parents. Or doing whatever they can to get out of the family business.

In real life, though, things aren’t that simple. You can’t just quit when you feel like it. Take it from me – I should know. My family has been in the kidnapping business for generations.  Five generations, to be exact. The White family has been a prominent name in the underground world for nearly a hundred years. And there’s not an easy way to walk away. 

Actually, as far as I know, there’s not a way to walk away at all. No one has ever been stupid enough to try. Even thinking about trying to walk away is making me sweat a little. In the kidnapping community, it isn’t that walking away just isn’t done (although it isn’t), it’s that there are people that actively ensure that anyone who enters the community stays in the community. There’s only one real way to leave, and that way out is through a body bag.

I know that seems extreme, but you’ll have to excuse my nerves. I’m not actually supposed to be writing any of this down, but someone needs to record what happens in my world. Maybe I’ve made it seem like it’s separate from me. That wasn’t my intention. Kidnapping isn’t just the world I was born into. It’s also part of who I am. It’s engrained in my bloodline, and I’ve been an active participant in this world for the last ten years.

When the average person hears the word kidnapping, they think of all the horrible stories they have ever heard on the news. Little girls and boys that go missing, only for the snatchers to threaten to kill the children unless given an outrageous sum of money to return the children, and, even then, the children are rarely ever returned. That’s not the world I was born into. There’s a difference between the world of kidnappers – my world – and the world of snatchers.

But it’s not a difference that you’re going to hear anywhere else. Because the average person doesn’t know there is a difference. Doesn’t know that it is possible to distinguish between the kidnapping community and the snatchers who try to imitate us. Except the snatchers always get it wrong. Because we don’t issue threats and we don’t take money. We don’t need money, and there is no reason for us to issue any threats. Generally, we don’t kill. 

We do have interrogators – experts in torture. They play a unique role in our world. But wait – I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me backtrack. The kidnapping community is one that benefits society as a whole. We don’t go after the kids of rich families. Like I said, we don’t need money. And we typically don’t go after children under the age of twelve. Because everyone we kidnap is expected to learn how to play a vital role in our community, we don’t take on anyone too young to understand what is happening to them or what it means to be integrated into our community.

Snatchers have no standards, and there is no community that connects them. They are solitary criminals, generally going after children of high profile society figures to get money. There are other, more heinous types of criminals, as well. Including traffickers, and we do our best to keep away from them because they do have a community. As distasteful as we find traffickers, our two communities have an understanding – we stay away from their targets, and they stay away from ours. A turf war between kidnappers and traffickers wouldn’t be pretty. And the ones that would suffer the most would be the kids. While the traffickers wouldn’t have a problem with that, we would.

But I’m getting ahead of myself again. I’m used to being surrounded by people who understand my world, the world of kidnappers. I mentioned already that we don’t target the children of high profile families and that we also have a certain age range that we target. While exceptions are made, on occasion, we generally keep to the twelve to twenty range. We rarely target anyone under twelve or over twenty. Children under twelve aren’t capable of the complex abstract reasoning that is vital to surviving in our community, and adults past twenty have usually found a place for themselves in the world at large. That’s not always true, and when we make an exception, we usually make it for those exceeding the maximum of our preferred age range rather than for those not meeting the minimum age. 

But we also only target those we know won’t be missed. We find most of our marks out on the streets, begging for food or for a warm place to sleep. We look for those who are doing what they can to bring themselves up out of the position they have found themselves in – those who are inspired to not let the world get them down. It’s easy to tell the difference, too, especially when you’ve been trained in the art of observation the way I was trained.

For the average person, it can be hard to tell the difference between a kid standing on the street begging for food who genuinely wants to improve their situation and who is simply looking for their next free hand out. But the difference is in their demeanor. There’s a fire, a spark, a light in the eyes of those who refuse to bow down to the situation that they have found themselves in. That’s a light that doesn’t exist in those who have given up and shut down. And that light is what marks the difference between our marks and the marks of traffickers. Because the people traffickers go after are the ones that no longer have that light, the ones that have lost their spark.

For us, the light is required before we will even consider making someone a mark. Because we don’t rehabilitate. We integrate. Everyone we kidnap, we do so with the expectation of fully integrating them into our world. We kidnap those who still have fight left, then we target that fight and turn it in our favor. We turn them into kidnappers, too, so our community is always growing, always expanding. We kidnap to give them a chance to get ahead in the messy world we live in, and, in turn, we teach them how to reach out their hand in the same way to someone else.

Because of this, because of the way our community is structured, people don’t walk away. Why would anyone walk away from the first community they have ever found that supports them? Sure, we may ask them to do things that are criminal and have to get past their moral hang-ups (which is partially where interrogators come in), but we support everyone in our community. The network in the kidnapping world is breathtakingly expansive, as it stretches across the globe. There isn’t a single country where we aren’t represented.

That’s also true of the trafficking world, and we are always having to navigate one another’s worlds when we run into each other. That happens a lot more often than any of us like. Because traffickers don’t care about supporting their community. They don’t try to integrate anyone into their world. All they care about is making profit. They are similar to snatchers in that regard, but they are far, far worse because there’s a network that allows them to flourish.

I’m not going to say that the kidnapping world is a perfect one because there are those who slip through the cracks. There are those whose dark tendencies we miss, and they start targeting for the sake of torture rather than the sake of community. We call them renegades, and they are hazardous to the health of our community. Dealing with renegades – that’s the real reason interrogators exist.

It’s only been sixty years since the concept of interrogators was introduced into our world. The number of renegades had reached its peak, and we didn’t have a solid way to deal with them. My great-grandmother, Catarina, was the one who came up with the concept of interrogators. It’s not like torture is unheard of in the underground – traffickers, assassins, and drug lords have their own experts in torture. But as kidnappers, we’d never thought we’d need interrogators of our own. But with renegades becoming more and more prominent, it became obvious very quickly that we needed some way to deal with them. Because renegades were causing problems for everyone in the kidnapping world, problems I won’t go into right now.

Suffice it to say, interrogators came about because we needed a way to get renegades out of our community. Mass murder wasn’t really an option, though it was on the table. The assassin community had volunteered to deal with our problem for us, but we rejected them almost out of hand. We don’t usually kill our targets. Even renegades aren’t killed unless they are too far gone for an interrogator to reshape. The purpose of an interrogator is to break and rebuild renegades from the ground up. So they torture them to breaking point over and over, then build them back up. When they are done, the renegades are reformed and able to rejoin our world. It’s not a pretty process, and it’s not a kind process, but renegades are usually not kind people to begin with. Regardless, I have little sympathy.

And in my world, there are very few things that you can do that will get you killed out of hand. Walking away, turning your back on a community that risked so much to bring you into it to begin with, is one of those things. We pride ourselves on our commitment to each other, to the support we offer. We reclaim renegades rather than killing them out of hand. To walk away from a community that is ready and willing to fully integrate every person that enters it is an unforgivable offense. That’s why even thinking about it makes me sweat. Because we’re not just a community, we’re a family. While that may seem corny, there is no one I would trust at my back more than another kidnapper. And, unlike with the world at large, I always know that if there is a kidnapper standing beside me, I will never have to worry about being betrayed.

Because there are laws in our community about renegades – they have to proclaim themselves as such. Failing to proclaim your status as a renegade if you choose to go down that path means that you will be killed without question. Renegades can be reclaimed. Outliers cannot. And we don’t try to reclaim them. If any of us find an Outlier – if any of us  _ discover _ – an Outlier, communal law requires we kill them without a second thought. It doesn’t matter if that person is one of your best friends. Once an Outlier, never a kidnapper. It’s that simple – and that brutal.

I’ve been lucky in that I’ve not yet found an Outlier. I’ve dealt with a few Renegades. I’ve sent them on to Interrogators to reclaim, but I’ve never had to kill someone myself. I don’t know how hard I will find it to do when it happens – if it happens – but I know I will do it. Because I have an obligation as the heir of the White family to uphold the letter and the spirit of the communal law we all live by. 


	2. Chapter Two

Now that I’ve told you where I come from, I should probably tell you a little about who I am, including my status in the kidnapping community. My name is Alyssa White, and I am twenty-two years old. If you remember earlier that I mentioned I’ve been active in the kidnapping world for the last ten years, then you’ll realize that means I’ve been actively working as a kidnapper since I was twelve years old.

For the first four years, I accompanied my older brothers, learning the ins-and-outs from them. Sometimes I accompanied my parents rather than my siblings, but I was always with someone when the acquisition was made. But before I ever started going on acquisition raids with my family, I spent a lot of time with other kidnappers and their acquired marks. While other children were going to school learning how to do arithmetic and how to write (which I was also learning), my core curriculum consisted of learning how to observe. Learning how to distinguish between our marks and the marks of traffickers. Learning what was and wasn’t acceptable in the kidnapping world. Learning the communal law and why it was so important that I uphold both the letter and the spirit of it.

In the kidnapping world, the White family name is prominent because the White family is one of the most important and impactful families in our community. When I say that my family has been in the kidnapping business for the last five generations, I only mean they have been prominent for the last five. From what I have gleaned, we have always been part of the community in some way. But five generations back, the head of the White family stepped up and took responsibility for cleansing the community for all the Outliers that had cropped up. The White family became notorious for that practically overnight. The community had become so besieged by Outliers at that point in time that the lines between the kidnapping world and the trafficking world were starting to blur. That’s when my family stepped up and drew a line in the sand. Within the space of a month, over five thousand Outliers in the United States had been rounded up and executed on the spot. While five thousand might seem like a lot, back then there were approximately two million kidnappers in the United States alone. Across the globe, that total number was around five hundred million.

After my family stepped up to deal with Outliers, the rest of the kidnapping world followed. Within the space of a year, about three million Outliers had been executed, and the kidnapping world had been purged. So, when I say that I will always be able to deal with an Outlier, even though I haven’t yet had to face that, I know that I must be able to deal with one because my entire family’s reputation would be on the line. And, after what my family did in order to become a prominent name in the kidnapping world, I cannot risk doing anything to jeopardize our standing.

Because the White family is not only a prominent name in the kidnapping world, we are also one of the leading families. Which means that what we do sets the tone for the entire globe of the kidnapping community. Everything I do is always under scrutiny.

Also, I mentioned that I have older brothers and that I’m the heir of the family. In the kidnapping world, heirs aren’t determined by birth order or by gender. Heirs are determined by capability. I have three older brothers, two older sisters, two younger brothers, and three younger sisters, so my family is very large. As soon as I surpassed my elder siblings in the kidnapping world – a process that is rather convoluted – I was declared the heir. If any of them surpass me, or if any of my younger siblings, when they come of age, surpass me, then they will take that role over. I don’t intend to let go of the role, however, because I have a lot of things planned.

The first of which has to do with my college, which I will go into a bit later. For now, let me tell you a little bit more about the process I had to go through in order to be declared the heir.*

Before a kidnapper can start going on raids, they have to undergo a sequence of sessions with an interrogator. The secrecy of our world is one of the first things we learn to protect, which is why writing this down is so nerve-wracking for me. I spent the first half of the year after my twelfth birthday with interrogators. They taught me the art of keeping silent, and they also taught me the art of keeping others silent. I learned the trade of the interrogators before I ever went on my first kidnapping raid. 

And learning the art of the interrogator was the first task that I was set as a potential heir of the White family. In my family, there is always an heir with the title of Heir Apparent, but it is a title that many people have worn. Like I said before, heirs in the kidnapping world are decided based on capability and not by age. Bloodline matters, of course, but age doesn’t. Neither does gender. And heirs in the kidnapping world don’t work the same way as heirs in aristocratic families work, either. 

In the kidnapping world, heirs are the ones who are primed to become the next head of household. The head of the household is expected to manage anything and everything relating to the kidnapping world. Each family has its own branch of kidnappers and its own branch of interrogators. Each family has its own connections with several branches of government in several countries. Each family has ties to every other underground world that exists, including the world of traffickers, sure, but also including the world of drug cartels, the world of black market deals (in both information and goods), the world of assassins (and all that implies), and the world of information brokers. 

As soon as I was old enough to speak, I was thrust into the middle of all of those worlds. I have friends who are assassins, and I have friends who are information brokers. I have connections with people inside the world of drug cartels, inside the black market, and even a few connections with traffickers. I’m not fond of these last three groups, but I work with them because I have to. The goals of the world that I am a part of means that I can put aside my own set of ethics when I need to in order to get things done. 

To be declared the Heir Apparent, I had to prove that I could handle taking on the responsibilities of an interrogator after being taught the ins and outs of the profession. Nine months after I turned twelve, I was declared an expert interrogator and sent on to the people who would train me in all the methods we use in order to kidnap our marks. 

Before me, the fastest that anyone had ever earned the title of expert interrogator had been within the space of five years. No one before me had been declared an expert at such a young age. At first, I took no pride in it. Interrogation is just as terrible as it sounds, and I didn’t enjoy the work. I still don’t enjoy it, but I will do whatever is necessary for the good of my community. 

I grew up hearing the stories of my parents, my grandparents, and the stories of my extended family. I know what we have contributed. I understand the complexity and the breadth of the empire that my family has created. I also know that there is still a lot more that needs to be done. Most of my siblings care only about their own conquests. They measure their success by the number of individuals they kidnap and then integrate into our world. Their contributions are welcome, of course, and I’m not saying that measuring success in that way is invalid. It just isn’t enough for me. 

I want a world that is full of havens for kidnappers. Places all over the world where people in my world can congregate without having to worry about being caught, without having to worry about saying the wrong thing to the wrong person. Being so young when I mastered interrogation allowed me to take an unprecedented role in my world - I became the Heir Apparent to the White family at 15, which is the earliest age that anyone can be declared an Heir. Since then, all of my siblings have reached that age. At this point, there is no competition for the Heir position. 

If I said that I never worried about anyone taking my title away from me, I’d be lying. Everyone in my family is competent. Every single one of my siblings broke a record of some sort. Robert, my younger brother, became the first kidnapper to ever successfully capture three marks at the same time, with no backup. Each time one of my siblings broke a new record, I worried that my title would be taken away. Because of how worried I became, I proactively sought new methods and means for us to get around in the legal world. 

I developed a system of schools for the younger marks, the ones who had gone through the first year. The first year a mark spends in our care, we desensitize them. That’s a nice way to say that we torture and brainwash them into our community. There’s nothing nice about the process, but every single one of us went through it. I became an expert at interrogation only after I had been interrogated myself. That process makes a person hard. 


End file.
